For Newt Gingrich, this was the ultimate fantasy camp: war games in the Mojave Desert. In the summer of 1987, he was a Republican rising. Reared ina military family, he’d never served, and never wanted to. And yet here he was, practicing the latest in AirLand Battle doctrine: quick strike, high tech. A student of military history, a proponent of the new theory – a general manque – he didn’t think it was enough to see the games. He had to play them. So he bought his own fatigues. He was wired with lasers to “kill” or be killed. He rode in the tanks with infantry from Fort Benning, where his stepfather had been stationed. The climax was joining OPFORS, the team of resident toughs who play the Russians. At night, OPFORS stole into the infantry camp. They let him capture the leader. “Newt was one tired but happy man,” said Steve Hanser, a companion on that trip. “He was precisely where he wanted to be.”
Newton Leroy Gingrich has always played soldier. Sixteen years ago he slipped into a Democratic fortress called the U.S. House of Representatives, and has spent the intervening years calling in reinforcements. This week his Republican army takes control. War is a hoary metaphor of politics, but Gingrich gives it new meaning. To him, politics really is a matter of life or death, of good or evil, of domination or loss. He has spent a career trying to prove that politics is as tough as war, as important to freedom. “Politics and war are remarkably similar systems,” he says, proudly.
In his mind – a place that matters these days – Gingrich is a war leader. He consumes books on war and warriors, from serious nonfiction to Tom Clancy. He is a knowledgeable student of – and sometime participant in – the development of the new AirLand doctrine. He not only studied military theorists such as Clausewitz and Sun-tzu: he’s taught them at war colleges. His models are men who bridged war and politics: Churchill, FDR and de Gaulle in the 20th century; Abraham Lincoln in the 19th; George Washington, father of his country, in the 18th. They had vast goals, and yet the most personal methods. They used both central authority and eloquence to unify their countries in time of crisis. Is Gingrich’s vision of leadership grand or merely grandiose? We are about to find out.
Newt’s approach to politics has its virtues. War leaders can see – as few in Washington can – how disparate events and trends relate. (“System” is one of Gingrich’s favorite words.) Discipline and steadiness of purpose are more important than ideology. Gingrich’s message has hardly wavered since he entered politics. His goal has always been the same – the fight against corruption, bloated government and a decaying social order. In his first congressional candidacy in 1974, from an obscure rural west Georgia district, he declared that America’s faith in itself was at risk. It sounds overheated. But he was right. Inflation, Vietnam and Watergate had begun to corrode Americans’ confidence in the future.
But if Newt is fighting a war, who is the enemy? To him the war is at home, and the enemy is an us that is not us – the abnormal Americans. The cold war abroad has become the hot war at home: a cultural battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. The best label for him, he says, is “American Gaullist.” De Gaulle restored France. His faith was in “nationalism and technology,” Gingrich says. But de Gaulle, a symbol of freedom, ended up an autocrat, a man behind a gilded desk who thought that only he could see the future of his country, and who saw his worst enemies among his fellow countrymen. Another American who admired de Gaulle was Richard Nixon. And we all know what happened to him.
Newt’s Gaullist ego already has gotten him in trouble. After his November election victory, he and his wife, Marianne, dashed off a 17-page book proposal. A bidding war ensued. They signed a $4.5 million contract with HarperCollins – joining the likes of Ronald Reagan, Norman Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell in the stratosphereof book advances. But Gingrich may have been too arrogant,too oblivious or too greedy tosee the questions that would arise. Wasn’t HarperCollins owned by Rupert Murdoch? And doesn’t he have business before the FCC? (Last week FCC officials were looking closely at the deal.) Wasn’t a Democratic speaker of the House named Jim Wright once destroyed over a book deal, and wasn’t Newt the man who nuked him? What staff – and what taxpayer money – might be used to help producethe book? House Republicans grumbled. Conservative columnist Robert Novak predicteddisaster. Bob Dole dourlycomplained. Late last week Gingrich retreated – sort of. He won’t take the advance, only royalties, if any.
Newt Gingrich’s emergence as the Warrior Speaker makes sense if you understand the organizing principle of his life: he is a cold-war army brat who never served in the military himself. Newt is the product of what the author Mary E. Wertsch has called “The Fortress”: the nomadic tribeof the American military and their dependents, the warrior nation within. In his youth the population of this itinerant and politically conservative Other America numbered almost 10 million. Its citizens identified not with one specific place but with the nation’s destiny as a whole. After all, it was your dad who was defending it. “I’m from nowhere,” Gingrich once told a friend in graduate school. But that wasn’t quite right. He was from The Fortress.
Inside, the small details of domestic life were uncertain and sometimes threatening. As the stepson of an army officer, Newt moved continually: five schools in three states and two countries in eight years. In each new place the social drill was the same. A flock of strange faces. Taunts at the unusual name, and the nearsighted, bookish boy who bore it. “You grow up an army brat named Newton and you learn about combat,” he once said.
Outside the Fortress, the sense of impending apocalypse was at its most intense during the time Newt was living there: the cold-war ’50s. Newt arrived in France with his family in 1956, when the Hungarian Uprising seemed to portend war. He was 13. Back in the United States, kids were learning to kneel under desks in case of nuclear attack. In Europe, you were on the front lines of a possible nightmare. “You have to understand that at that time people thought the balloon could go up at any second in Europe,” says Gingrich’s friend Hanser, a military historian. The army insisted thatdependents prepare for emergency evacuation. Newt’s mother was ordered to assemble a box with food, clothing and maps of escape routes. His stepfather, an infantry officer, routinely was called away in the night. His mother worried about how she would retrieve her son from school. “How would I get Newtie?” she remembers thinking.
Soon Newt saw proof of what could happen when politicians and generals lose their grip on history. In the spring of 1957, he made a trip to the World War I battlefield at Verdun, where 1 million French and German soldiers died in the most important – and senselessly brutal – standoff in military history. Gingrich’s visit to the ossuary there is the central scene in his mental movie of himself. The ossuary was a white building with its lower windows blacked out. Over the years paint had been scratched away. If you bent close and peered into the gloom, you saw mountains of bones.
The lesson was clear: good people must dominate or be dominated. “All that summer I kept thinking to myself, “This is crazy’,” he says. “People really do bad things to each other. You had better have people who are dedicated, strong enough to stop the evil.” At Verdun, he says, he learned that “politics meant allowing somebody to dominate your life.”
In an existence that feels rootless and suffused with combat, one needs a strong sense of self. Assembling one was not an easy matter for Newt Gingrich. He was born in Harrisburg, Pa., in 1943, the son of a 19-year-old mechanic named Newton C. McPherson and a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Kathleen Daugherty. The marriage failed within days. Three years later “Kit” Daugherty married Robert B. Gingrich, who gave “Newtie” the last name he still bears. Even so, Newt kept strong links to the McPhersons. He spent boyhood summers with a McPherson aunt. To this day he wears a McPherson tartan tie, and reveres Robert the Bruce who unified Scotland in the 14th century. Yet, Newt isn’t fully a McPherson either. His real father, “Big Newt,” was an illegitimate child who never knew who his real father was.
Deriving a sense of identity from his stepfather wasn’t easy. Bob Gingrich was that classic figure of army-brat life: the distant hero. He was ever-present – but only in the movies. The owner of a theater allowed Newtie to work sweeping up. He saw “The Sands of Iwo Jima” four times in one day while his father was in Korea in 1953. In the movie, the tough and unemotional John Wayne unifies his disparate band of men, and plants the flag. “It was probably the most formative single film of my life,” Gingrich says.
His stepfather taught him to respect authority and military ideals. “You could see the dedication and discipline,” Newt says, “the notion that you make investments in your life over very long periods.” Yet Bob Gingrich felt slighted as well as ennobled by the army. An ROTC graduate out of Gettysburg College, he’d been told he had promise as an officer. Instead, the bureaucrats kept sidetracking him. At the end of his career, the army made him an infantry instructor and a colonel. It even sent him to Vietnam in 1969. But he never got the star.
Gingrich’s was a typical army home in another way as well: it was run by a strong woman. Kit was fiercely protective of her son, and from his infancy until 13, his grandmother lived with the family too. A teacher by profession, the older woman taught the boy to read. Years later, explaining his troubles with married life, Gingrich said that he had found much of his own story in a pop-psych book called “Men Who Hate Women.” Such men, the author wrote, both need and resent the presence of dominating women. “It’s a wonder I’m not a psychological mess,” he told a friend in New Orleansyears ago.
In a life of uncertainty and contradiction, Gingrich sought order elsewhere. He began finding it in intellectual pursuits as a boy. Flat-footed as well as nearsighted, he had little interest in sports, and he read voraciously. He immersed himself in “systems” safely distant from his own world: studying animals, collecting fossils. When the family was posted to Fort Riley, Kans., in 1953, Newt spent days hunting specimens on a formation known as Rim Rock, his only companion a pet Doberman.
After Verdun, he began to see ordered patterns in the ebb and flow of human history. The answer to fear and brutality was to worship the “rational,” a favorite Gingrich word. He wrote a paper about the balance of power and the virtue of realpolitik. He read Toynbee on the rise and fall of civilizations. Technology, he decided, shaped history. When the Russians put up sputnik in 1957, he became a believer in technology as the key to survival. He read aviation and space magazines. He became a science-fiction fan, extending his view of combat to the realms of outer space. He read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy,” a science-fiction masterpiece in which a great mathematician foresees a galactic empire’s doom and rescues its knowledge for future use.
By the end of high school, and his return to the United States, the only question was: how would he make his mark in the history of empire? Gingrich found the answer in 1960, when his family followed his stepfather to “the home of infantry” at Fort Benning in Georgia. The post, in Columbus, was where Bob Gingrich’s career had begun. Now his son would launch his own, in the city of army brats. Newt wouldn’t be a soldier, he’d be a politician.
Viewed over a span of 33 years, the pattern of Newt’s ascent has a remarkable consistency: seize opportunities but be patient about results. Build networks, in the media and at the grass roots. Portray yourself as the crusading slayer of Democratic Party corruption. Don’t worry about the niceties of ideological consistency. A decade ago Gingrich produced a book called “Window of Opportunity,” a miscellany of writings about his brand of futuristic conservatism. But the title is an ironically apt description of his career.
Within months of his arrival in Columbus, he was running a friend’s campaign for class president. Jimmy Tilton won, and they became a team. They walked miles together to adult Republican meetings. They canvassed the town for Richard Nixon. At Emory University in Atlanta, Newt started a Young Republican club. Two years later he and Tilton ran a congressional campaign. The candidate was Jack Prince, a wealthy chicken processor and ardent fan of Barry Goldwater. Newt wasn’t. His ancestralRepublicanism from central Pennsylvania was of a blander sort. But he got wild for Barry. And why not? Republicans were rising in the South. Prince lost, but Goldwater won Georgia.
To play in the big leagues of presidential politics, Gingrich tacked in the other direction four years later. In 1968 he was a graduate student at Tulane. As a father with two young children, not to mention bad eyes and feet, he was immune from the draft. His best friend at the time was David Kramer, a moderate from California. Kramer suggested they run the nominating campaign in Louisiana for New York’s Gov. Nelson Rockefeller. It was a long way from Goldwater – or Nixon, for that matter. Rockefeller was a big-government liberal. But his campaign in Louisiana was an opportunity: none of the GOP big shots in the state wanted to run it. Shrewdly, Gingrich and Kramer saw that they could get blacks to take part in the local caucuses. They packed the events, and were successful enough to annoy the top brass at Nixon headquarters. Rockefeller didn’t win, but Newt got to go to the convention.
Newt’s opportunism, often a virtue in politics, can be devastating in private life. Gingrich has a deep feel for human history, but not always for human beings. “He’s a user in a town of users,” says a GOP consultant who has worked with him. The story of his first marriage is familiar: a wife seven years his senior who helped put him through school, bore him two daughters, and whom he divorced once he hit the big time in Washington. But there are other examples. When “Big Newt” was gravely ill in 1972, his son visited him in Pennsylvania. Instead of offering him soothing words, his mother recalls, Gingrich harshly lectured him not to feel sorry for himself. Gingrich now says he didn’t know his dad had cancer, but Kit still cringes at the memory. In New Orleans his best friends were next-door neighbors, and he later inscribed a campaign photo to them as “to my other mom and dad.” But when the other “dad” died in 1982, Newt never sent condolences.
Still, Gingrich’s talents as a “user” have helped him build his political networks. He has been an indefatigable user of the media. He and Jimmy Tilton befriended the TV-station owner in Columbus. When Newt moved to Atlanta, he called the Atlanta Constitution, and became buddies with another important Republican, Reg Murphy, then the paper’s political editor. In New Orleans, Gingrich astonished friends by picking up the phone to tell Mike Wallace or David Broder – whom he didn’t know – what was going on in the student movement at Tulane. When he first ran forCongress, Newt got to know Broder and cultivated him and other Washington reporters for years before he actually arrived in the capital. He did the same with C-Span, which arrived in D.C., the same year he did, 1979. Newt was one of the first C-Span stars, and it remains a key to his power.
He works the grass roots just as diligently. When he first ran for Congress in 1974, he tapped into two movements then emerging: environmentalism and the New Right. He ran as a “green” of sorts, winning the endorsement of the League of Conservation Voters for his stands on air and water pollution. At the same time, he made an early alliance with New Right leader Paul Weyrich, whose Free Congress Foundation now shows Gingrich’s television show on its cable channel. In 1983 Gingrich founded the Conservative Opportunity Society, whose main job turned out to be spreading his views at the 1984 GOP convention. Two years later he took over a PAC no one cared much about, GOPAC, and turned it into a machine for training Republicans and for promoting him as their guru.
While he’s been developing his alternative networks, Gingrich has maintained an ambivalent relationship with established powers. He professes to despise the Big Media, but continues to stroke its leaders. He has trashed the institution of the House, yet now says he will restore it to glory. Though he has a crabby view of the Ivy League, he wanted to go there for his Ph.D.; Princeton was his dream. “Princeton sent me a rejection letter so elegantly worded that I still think of myself as an alumnus,” he says. Might they not now think of an honorary degree? “No way,” he says. “They’d block me there the way Oxford blocked Margaret Thatcher.”
Undergirding all of this strategic maneuvering has been a relentless adherence tothe theme of political corruption and societal “decay” (another often-used Newtonian word). His first public speech, when he founded the Young Republicans at Emory in 1962, foreshadowed all that was to come. The YRs, he said, would fight “corrupt one-party” rule and replace an old-line establishment that didn’t see the highly industrialized future of Georgia. When he went on to run for the House, he found his campaign voice in the harsh style of cold-war propaganda – domesticated for local use. Every Georgia opponent was “corrupt” and too tolerant of “decay” in society. And it was always Us Versus Them. “Solid Americans,” he declared while campaigning for Nixon in 1972, should be alarmed about the prospect of a George McGovern presidency.
In Washington, he pursued the same arguments, with a vehemence that was chillingly effective. Within weeks of arriving in 1979, he sought the ouster of a Democratic congressman, Charles Diggs, who had been convicted for financial irregularities. Soon thereafter he went after two other members – one Democrat and one Republican – who had been reprimanded for sexual improprieties. When Jim Wright became speaker in 1987, Gingrich vowed to destroy him. Wright, Gingrich told author John M. Barry, was the one Democrat in the House who could slow the GOP’s rise to power. He was far more energetic and partisan than the retiring Tip O’Neill – and he was succeeding in leading the nation from the House.
In Newt’s campaign to destroy Wright, he used all the weapons he had acquired – the grass-roots support, the media savvy, his inside knowledge of the Congress – and followed the latest in military thinking: knock out the enemy army’s command and control. Gingrich assigned his staff, including his press secretary, to scrounge for dirt. They fed it to reporters, who dug up more on their own. Gingrich himself worked the upper reaches of the media, elevating his own spiel to a critique of the House itself. Corruption was endemic. The system had to be transformed. It was the GOP’s sad duty. And, by the way, how come you guys aren’t doing more on the Wright story?
This was Newt’s Verdun. It was OK, even useful, to be seen as an assassin – so long as your aim was true. If he failed to get Wright, he’d be seen as a reckless failure. And that would ruin his chances to move up to GOP whip. Wright, Gingrich had declared, was a “genuinely bad man.” But the only way to prove it was to get Common Cause, arbiter of ethics, to attack Wright. Gingrich, Barry writes in his biography of Wright, desperately needed the group to call for an investigation of a book deal Wright had engineered. It had paid Wright inflated “royalties” from interest groups such as the Teamsters. Repeatedly, Gingrich called Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, asking when the group would formally request an ethics-committee probe. No answer. Finally, The Wall Street Journal ran a huge editorial. “Why is everyone going easy on Jim Wright?” it asked. That was enough. Common Cause called for an investigation. And the rest would follow: Wright’s leaving the House in disgrace, Newt’s two-vote win in the whip race.
Still, for all its discipline and consistency of purpose, Newtonian leadership embraces troubling contradictions. In the name of decentralizing politics, Gingrich is acquiring extraordinary centralized power in the House. His young members look up to him, his committee chairmen are beholden to him and he is choreographing every step in the consideration of the GOP’s “Contract With America.” He says he’s for term limits, but he’s already been in the House 16 years. He has long inveighed against the corrupting power of special-interest money in Washington, yet has set up a vast architecture of enterprises to empower and promote himself: a PAC, two foundations, two book projects and a television show. He won’t disclose the source of the millions of dollars GOPAC has received. He backed off his $4.5 million book deal. But he refuses to see the irony or the hypocrisy: another speaker, another book, another Jim Wright?
Gingrich has been working for the moment that arrives this week for more than three decades. But he remains a little-known figure, and in recent memory no national politician has gone from relative obscurity to so much power in such a hurry. And yet he measures himself against men who are not only famous but heroic. He insists that he is a constructive revolutionary, not a destructive one. “When Jefferson said, “Every generation needs a revolution,’ he was not making an argument for chaos,” Gingrich says. “He was making an argument for the creative replacement of the old order with a new order. If all you are is a revolutionary with no sense of order, you’re just a bandit.” Will Newt mellow into an Ike, or grow into a Patton in politics? Or will he just turn out to be a bandit? “I think he is growing, maturing faster than anyone I know,” says Rep. Nancy Johnson, a longtime friend. “He’s a dangerous man,” says his last congressional opponent, Democrat Ben Jones.
In the meantime, there is a spaciousnew office to decorate. Gingrich knows precisely which print he wants broughtto his office. Its a mural-size portraitof George Washington at the Battle of Princeton. Washington, Gingrich likes to observe, was at once farmer, businessman, writer, leader. And he was powerful in more literal ways as well. “He was the most physically imposing man in the Colonies,” Newt once told an audience of supporters. “By today’s standards, you’d have to imagine him 6 feet 9, 290 pounds, as big and strong as any football player.” He was the soldier-father of his country. Americans eagerly listened to his voice – and followed. Gingrich is searching for that voice even now.
The information appears in the following order: Old Right 1952-64; New Right 1954-80; Reagan Right 1980-84; Newt Right 1989-?
Barry Goldwater, Strom Thurmond, John Tower; Jesse Helms, Jack Kemp, Ronald Reagan; Ronald Reagan; Newt Gingrich
Publication of William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale,” 1951. An insider’s attack on the liberal elite.; Reagan pro-Goldwater speech, 1964, Panama Canal debate, 1977, Kemp-Roth tax cut, 1978; 1981 budget tax bill, 1982 tax hike, 1984 Rush Limbaugh goes national; 1990 tax bill betrays Bush’s “read my lips” promise, 1994 GOP election sweep
Party of the Right, made up of Yale students. Young Americans for Freedom, pro-Goldwater; Jesse Helm’s Congressional Club. Free Congress Foundation; White House political office. The Heritage Foundation; Christian Coalition. National Rifle Association. GOPAC
The National Review. Human Events, a weekly newspaper; “Firing Line,” TV show hosted by William F. Buckley; “McLaughlin Group”. Washington Times. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page; C-Span. Rush Limbaugh’s radio show. The American Spectator
Roger Miliken, textile magnate. Anyone on National Review’s mailing list; Adolph Coors. Panama Canal direct-mail campaign; The Devos family of Amway Corp. Ollie North’s dowager followers; Steve Forbes, son of Malcolm
“The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek. “Witness,” Whittaker Chambers. “Conscience of a Conservative,” Barry Goldwater; “Free to Choose,” Milton Friedman. “The Way the World Works,” Jude Wanniski. “Gulag Archipelago,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn; “Wealth & Poverty,” George Gilder. “The Hunt for Red October,” Tom Clancy; “The Book of Virtues,” William J. Bennett. “The Third Wave,” Alvin Toffler. “The Way Things Ought to Be,” Rush Limbaugh
William Rusher, F. Clifton White, M. Stanton Evans; Richard Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Terry Dolan; Lyn Nofziger, Lee Atwater, Richard Wirthlin; Bill Kristol, Frank Luntz, Ralph Reed
25% think the “Contract With America” is a serious promise for which the new Republican Congress should be held responsible;
24% think it is just a campaign promise;
47% have never heard about it NEWSWEEK POLL
54% think a middle-class tax cut would be good for the country;
47% think the tax cut would reduce their federal taxes by $100 or less a year
Newt Gingrich has always played soldier. The son of an army infantry officer, he spent his youth frequently moving, consuming books and movies about war heroes. He grew up idolizing men like George Washington and Winston Churchill, who bridged war and politics. From his beginning in a broken family to his rapid ascent through the House Republican leadership, some snapshots from the album of Newt the political warrior.
title: “The Warrior” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-02” author: “Teresa Oliver”
Campbell’s joke was a good one, but for Blair it was no laughing matter then–and it is even less so today. When Blair flies into Washington this week to address a joint session of Congress, Americans will see one Blair and Britons another. Americans, including some who are not enamored of Bush, lionize Blair for his loyalty since 9-11 and for his articulate arguments in favor of invading Iraq. Later this year he is expected to become the first Briton since Winston Churchill to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. A headline on the op-ed page of The New York Times last week–in blair we trust–is typical of the adulation.
At home, however, Blair is in political trouble. As the war grinds on–with British soldiers being killed at the rate of one a week–and as weapons of mass destruction fail to appear, the prime minister’s poll ratings have tumbled to their lowest point since he took office in 1997. Forget trust. Analyzing the results of a survey that found support for the war at its lowest point (47 percent), The Times of London concluded last week that “more than half of voters would not trust [Blair] further than they could throw him.”
Blair will almost certainly weather this political storm. His political opposition–the Tories, crushed by Blair’s Labour Party in 1997–remains weak. He probably won’t schedule an election until 2005. But he will not emerge unscathed. As a source close to Blair acknowledged to NEWSWEEK, his advisers are “deeply worried about the trust gap” because it erodes his credibility not just on Iraq, but on domestic issues ranging from public-service reforms to Britain’s decision someday to adopt Europe’s single currency. As for Blair’s friends in the White House, perhaps the next time they invite him to Camp David they’ll think twice about putting him up in the cabin called Dogwood, as they did in March. Stothard points out in his book that the dogwood blossom is “the flower of fidelity.” But Britons are likely only to hear the canine allusion.
